


LMD

by illwynd



Category: Loki (2021) - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Life Model Decoys, M/M, Mathematics, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:55:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29484831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: The Tesseract skids to a halt at Loki’s feet while he waits for Thor to haul him back to Asgard. Seeing an opportunity, he picks it up and uses it to get away. But it takes him... well, he’s not sure where. It looks like the inside of Stark Tower, right back where he started. But now there is no one else to be seen, and the view out the window seems wrong...
Relationships: Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 54





	LMD

**Author's Note:**

> A post-EG sort-of AU, possibly-Loki-show-adjacent thing. I can't explain it more than that. Just trust me, OK?
> 
> Please forgive the math in this fic, too. Idek.

The world held its breath.

Or, at least, Loki did—Loki, with the muzzle over his face, his wrists and ankles shackled, held his breath as the Tesseract skidded to a stop just at his feet. 

Surely, such luck could not be real? Surely in half a moment someone would notice and stop him from what he was about to do, wouldn’t they? 

Loki did not wait to find out. The shackles did not at all prevent him from crouching down to the shiny, polished floor. Nor did they keep him from reaching out, mere inches, to place his hands upon the glowing cube. In fact, nothing and no one stopped him from grabbing it and quickly standing straight again; there was not even any shouting, aside from the chaos that had already been ongoing.

And though under other circumstances Loki might have enjoyed staying and watching such chaos, now did not seem like the ideal time for it.

He felt the Tesseract’s power in his hands. It was throbbing and oddly cold, as it had been before, but juddering now with some new quality that he did not recognize. 

For the briefest of instants, he wondered what sort of fortune it truly was that brought it back to his hand, just now. He had already built a new plan for himself out of the ashes of the old—allow himself to be captured, allow himself to sink low enough to be brought back to Asgard because at least it was _away_ , at least there he would be surrounded by powers besides his own, armies, forces that would defend… and it didn’t matter if he would be swiftly imprisoned. He would find some way out, sooner or later. Surely he would. So he could endure it, no matter how the thought of being subjected to Asgard’s “justice” galled him. As if he could _deserve_ it merely for having found a way to survive, for having done what he needed to do to prosper rather than… 

He cut off the thought before it could spiral.

He didn’t need to do any of that. In the space of a heartbeat… 

He was aware of the sight of Thor in the corner of his vision, still caught up in the chaos, all mussed blond hair and bluster and that wounded look that had been in his eyes since the moment they had reunited upon this realm, and all through their battles. 

Loki had no idea where this path might take him. He had no idea when he would dare to return, if he left now. When he might ever face Thor again.

And still it took much longer to recount it here than it did for him to come to his decision and reach out with his magic to take hold of the Tesseract, fully and willfully, and send himself away.

In the tower, he disappeared in a swirl of black smoke run through with a flicker of blue light. 

But he did not, in the next moment, reappear anywhere else in that universe, as should have been. 

Somehow, he was simply gone. 

*

Something was wrong.

Loki knew that as soon as he had done it. It was not the same this time. It _pulled_ , somehow. _Veered_. He tried to redirect it, but it no longer felt like his course was within his control.

_Whose, then?_

His heart pounded in his chest and his breath sped, but he did not let go. At any cost, he could not do that.

When he did this before, it was a swift journey, in which he could barely note the sights and sensations before it was done and the ground was under his feet again. 

This time… it was not so. 

It pulled, and Loki felt he was in a _place_. Dark, empty, and yet not empty. He could feel things moving somewhere near him, in the darkness all around, and it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His whole body tensed in readiness, readiness for the fight that was surely coming. 

But there was no ground. Nothing. Nothing but darkness. Nothing but the blue light in his hands, and he could almost feel its slow throbbing in his veins, a tidal pull upon his blood. 

Deep breaths. 

It was still in his hands, so it was still in his control, no matter what he felt. So he did all he could do. He called upon his magic. He reached out, inwardly, for the Tesseract’s power. He told it where he wanted to go. _Away. Away. Not home. Not back there. Somewhere safe. Somewhere safe and far, far away. Alfheim, perhaps? Or that one strange realm, with the crystals…_

Then the darkness around him began to move again, don’t ask how he could tell. It rushed past, a silent roar, an invisible scintillation of currents and eddies, a blast of intangible wind. 

Like he was falling. 

Worse—and far harder to explain—it was like he was falling many times over. Like many different Lokis were plunging through the dark, into the unknown, screaming, or silent, hearts all racing in their chests and eyes spread wide in horror. 

He could feel their thoughts all flickering through his head at once. He could almost _see_ —

He was suspended in the frozen depths of space and there was a ship, gleaming silver-grey and then swept with purple fire until it blinded him with a great explosion, leaving nothing but glittering debris. 

No… he was not. That was somewhere else. He was just a moment ago in the stream of the Bifrost and now he had been stricken and thrust outside it and instead of soaring he was tumbling through the darkness, body aching where it hit, a scream of frustration and agony caught in his throat. 

But that was not right either, because what was truly happening was that he was falling the same few feet over and over, trapped in a loop while his mind looked on, helpless, and his traitorous body panicking and gibbering and clawing at the air, at the blank walls of this thin, unreal magic construct of a space, _so childish, so puerile_ , rage almost overtook the terror but not quite, not quite…

Loki shook his head, trying to clear it, and he had been falling for so long, so far, he’d forgotten the sensation of air in his lungs and he was not sure why he was still alive, the tears frozen on his cheeks, and all he could think of was the way Thor looked above him, reaching out when he let go—

And then, in the next moment… he was back where he began, though the shackles and chains were gone.

The marble tiles of the floor were just the same as they had been moments ago when he stooped to pick up the Tesseract, and Loki’s head turned, frantic, trying to understand how he had made such a mistake. 

But there was no one near him. 

The hallway was utterly empty. More than that, there was a sense of quiet all around, a hush that made the sound ring out when he took a single hesitant step. 

Breathe. 

Breathe, and check for your own confirmation that the cube is still glowing in your hand, and then recall the mountain of sensors and cameras that Tony Stark littered his buildings with and glance up to the corners of the hallway, knowing they must be there, watching now…

They were indeed there. But they stared back glassy and unmoving, and Loki could neither hear nor feel the electronic hum that always accompanied such devices on this realm. 

And now that he had time to peer around himself more fully, he came to realize that though this was assuredly the same space, something had definitely changed. There was a hollow feeling to the space. It was dead. Empty. Quiet. 

A human might have called out. Loki simply took another deep breath. Tilted his head. Listened. 

What had happened?

His steps wandered toward the window, where he stood for a moment looking out. 

Imagine the cityscape of a disaster movie. Or, rather, one where the disaster happened years ago. Imagine half-fallen buildings and splotches of dark ruin. Imagine the strange sense of absence, of lack of all the little signs of life that usually form a city’s skin. Imagine wisps of incomprehensible smoke overlaid upon a dim sunset. That was what Loki saw. 

_What was this._

His palms itched, and the cube still glowed between them just before he enfolded it safely into a hidden pocket in the air. 

Better to hide that, for now. At least until he found out more. 

*

He was three floors down before anyone confronted him. And when it happened, it was Tony Stark, treading down the shiny marble hallway with an odd, measured deliberateness that didn’t fit with the other times they had met. Only a hint of that sardonic bravado he usually wore.

“Can I help you? We’re not exactly giving tours right now, and I can’t imagine you’d have come this far without something specific in mind.”

Loki had to resist the urge to glance down at himself—he was still attired in his armor and cape, was he not? Had he somehow been transformed to appear like the sort of mortal who would be entering Stark Tower for a tour? “Do you know who I am?” he asked instead.

Stark flickered a smile at him then. “Yeah, I know who you are. The supervillain Loki. The first warning we had.” The smile returned, even more briefly, pained. “You’re old news now, Rock of Ages.”

By then, the man had come close enough for Loki to notice more. Particularly the fact that something distinctly did not feel right about him. 

Something did not feel right about all of this. 

“Where are my manners,” Stark muttered and extended a hand to him. “Pleasure to meet you. I’m the Life Model Decoy of Tony Stark.”

The hand felt warm and human. The figure gazing back at him impassively looked, indeed, exactly like Stark, down to the wry intelligence in the eyes. 

Loki frowned, brows drawing together. “Life model…?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. A synthetic copy, perfect down to the last detail. Though I admit Tony hadn’t done a memory scan backup in the month before the Event, so I’m slightly out of date.”

Somehow that gave Loki more questions than answers. His eyes narrowed; he’d heard the capital letter there.

“… Event?”

The Life Model Decoy gave a shrugging sigh. “I guess I may as well show you. It’s not like you could really make things worse at this point. Come on.”

Stark—or whatever he was—turned, beckoning Loki to follow, and strode away. 

In confusion, dread and curiosity swirling within him, Loki followed. 

At the end of their walk was a room full of screens, and Loki watched as the Life Model Decoy of Tony Stark approached one, with a series of nigh-magical gestures to bring up images on all of them. 

“The Event was… well. Your old boss. He followed a few years after you. We didn’t do so well the second time. Maybe we'd gotten overconfident.”

On one of the screens, Loki recognized Thanos’ lieutenants, standing over a crowd of panicked Midgardians. On another, a massive battle, in what Loki assumed was some other part of this realm, with vast expanses of sunny, golden veldt swarming, insectlike, with inhuman armies, flares of energy blasts flashing amid smoke and the hum of silent cacophony.

“He managed to get the last of the stones from us. And he used them, despite our best efforts. Including—sorry—your brother’s.”

One of the screens showed the briefest clip of a figure that was unmistakably Thor, in the midst of the furious battle.

Except that did not look like Mjolnir in his hand. It was hard to be sure in such a momentary flash. But…

Loki said nothing about this detail, merely filing that away as yet another piece of the general strangeness of everything here. 

The rest of Stark’s statement was surely the more important part, anyway.

“So that madman carried out his ridiculous plan, did he?” Loki murmured, eyes still upon the destruction on the screens. 

Stark said years had passed. But for him it was only days ago that he was walking the finest of lines—trying to prove himself useful, trying to convince Thanos that he was an obedient minion, for just long enough to escape, just long enough to find some way to turn his plight to his advantage. 

He had been worried only about keeping himself alive, getting himself away. He had been concerned with surviving his own trials. He could not spare the energy to wonder if Thanos’ plans would ever come to fruition. That was a problem for some future day.

And now… it was over and done. 

This was a very different feeling from running toward escape. Darker, calmer. A quiet unsettled sensation, like spreading shadows. 

More destruction on the screens, turning suddenly to stillness. Flashes of news reports. People disappearing. Global confusion and panic. 

“So,” he went on. “Half your population is gone?”

The Life Model Decoy gave a dark laugh. “Have you ever heard of the law of large numbers?”

This brought Loki up short. “Not by that name, no.”

“It’s a probability thing. It says the more times you flip a fair coin, the closer you’re going to get to 50/50 results. The chances of flipping a coin a million times and getting a million tails are astronomical. You’d think that would mean that out of a planet of a little over seven billion, we’d be left with half that. Three and a half billion and change. But the problem is… there’s also a law of _very_ large numbers, which says that even those astronomical odds are going to come up eventually if you keep flipping the coin. And it’s a big universe.”

Stark wandered over to another screen, turned its view to a glittering representation of, perhaps, the galaxy. Distant swirls of nebulae. Stars and darkness. Zooming out, larger, until all those lights were merged together into one mere tiny dot among many others. 

“It’s an _infinite_ universe. If you flip a coin _that_ many times, now and then you will have a long, unbroken run where it only falls one way. At least,” he said with a sniff, “that’s my best guess for what happened to us. We’ve gotten messages from a few other worlds, and nowhere else was it as unbalanced as it was here. Maybe there’s some planet out there that lost no one. Maybe there’s some world that’s entirely dead now. Or maybe Thanos did it on purpose to punish us. But either way… we lost over 95% of our population that day. Back to where we were after the Black Death, centuries ago. So that ought to explain the view you saw out the window.”

It did. It explained the aura of emptiness, the ruin that had never been cleared away. But it didn’t explain…

“Why are you telling me this? As you said, I was in Thanos’ employ once, and led his forces against your realm. Why would you…”

“Like I also said, there’s not much you could do to make things worse. But if you’re—just a guess—not from around here, then it’s probably best if you have some context, when you see him.”

Loki turned, brow quirked. “What?”

“Where exactly _are_ you from, anyway?” Stark asked, turning on him suddenly. “I mean, I can tell this is all news to you, and I’ve been trying to figure out from your reactions how far back that goes, but I’ve got nothing. Either you’re most of a decade out of date or I’d hate to play poker with you.”

“I would not rule out the latter,” Loki said, trying to laugh.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You’re quite advanced for a synthetic being. Are you capable of feeling and thinking, truly? I had not known your realm had such technology.”

“Yeah, it’s impressive, isn’t it? I’m advanced enough to feel and think just like Tony did, and also advanced enough to notice when someone’s trying to avoid a topic.”

Loki exhaled sharply. “I am not entirely sure what happened. Thor was in the process of bringing me back to Asgard. Something went wrong in transit, I know not what, and I ended up here.”

It was close enough to the truth, and he certainly wasn’t going to explain any more than that.

The Life Model Decoy of Tony Stark eyed him, assessing. “I guess that would explain the Tesseract energy signature right when you dropped in. Well, there’s a lot more that’s happened since then, and by all rights I should just let you find out for yourself. But for his sake, I won’t.”

“Whose?”


End file.
